Happenings this week

Cheese, food and other bits and pieces

I’ve been busy lately and I really don’t know how it happened! My goal this year was to just slow down and enjoy my life! And now I’m sick! I have a head cold and I think I just need to rest.

Resting does mean still having to prepare food, but I get to take frequent breaks! Looking at my calendar in my phone, things don’t look like they’ll change much for the rest of the month. As my son said to me today - you have a lot of blue dots on your calendar.

Rest days in my house include things like nixtamilizing, cooking and (now) dehydrating corn and making ricotta.

In the dairy

I’ve been trying to milk as often as I can. I really want to make some butter, but I keep using the cream in other things. Or I decide to make cheese. I’ve been making quite a bit of feta and Yesterdaze cheese lately. With the price of oil lately - olive not crude, I’ve been brining the feta and enjoying it a lot more as well. I used to always marinate it in herbs and oil as a preference.

I’ve also been making ricotta every time I make cheese. We don’t have pigs to feed the whey too and honestly, it’s so worth getting the ricotta!

The link to both the Yesterdaze cheese and the method I use for mozzarella and ricotta, is below.

I had a few odds and ends of cheese the other day so made some cheesy sourdough crackers using this recipe. It’s important to leave them long enough to get crunchy. I didn’t so I put the few that I had left back in the oven and they were so good. A great recipe if you have too much discard. If you make them, let them get a little browner than this picture.

In the garden

We’ve been busy planting, so the garden is quite young at the moment. Harvesting coriander, leafy greens, Madagascar beans (I use the green ones in soup) and the last of my snake beans. I even found a tromboncini the other day, but I think these last two are all but finished. Eggplant that Maitland shifted are going well and I picked and ate a couple of them the other day.

Citrus is on!!! We’ve been picking oranges and grapefruit for a little while and now the mandarins are starting. Bush lemons are ripening but the domestic ones are still a way off.

Bananas are coming in steady. I was given some green cooking bananas the other day. These make very good chips. Here are some banana and arrowroot chips. Maitland cooked these by frying them in a butter/tallow/olive oil mix and then finished off in the oven. The arrowroot are the best chips, if you can get them crunchy - the bananas don’t taste so good when over cooked!

Processing

I’ve been making soups a bit lately, which means making lots of stock. I needed to stock up on my shelf stable stock, so pressure canned a pot full. I need to do more as we have very full freezers (bones take up space!), and we still have a few goats to put in them. We’ve just done our four pigs - finished the last two yesterday. They would be the biggest we’ve done for a while. I’ve frozen all the sausage and salami trim. When it cools down a fair bit more, we’ll take it out and mince it up and make sausages for freezing and salami for drying. I still have a couple of salamis left so the amount we did last year was pretty spot on.

A friend gave me some cherry tomatoes the other day, so they immediately got turned into sauce. (recipe in The Basics). This batch was only 750g tomatoes but it’s always worth doing a small batch when you have a thermomix.

I’m currently dehydrating corn. I soaked it last night and cooked it in lime water this morning. I’ve still got some of last year’s corn and have just processed this year’s so if we’re going to be eating more corn this year, I want to nixtamalize it first. By dehydrating it, it’ll have a lot more uses - corn bread, polenta, and a few other corny things I want to try, including adding some into my regular bread.

Other things we’ve eaten recently

Rice congee - I’ll share my version with my paid subscribers but here's one very similar (I like the texture from 8 cups of stock and I use medium grain white rice.)

Lately my bread has been, well….like a brick. I ran out of my favourite wheat flour and have been using other flours that haven’t quite worked as well. I’ve also started playing around with using an autolyse of various times. My main issue has been around the fact that I want to do an overnight soak - either without yeast or sourdough starter (autolyse) or an overnight rise with the starter. The problem with the latter is that it over proofs using fresh milled flour. The former - I haven’t really worked out the best mixing method.

I have at times made an overnight yeast bread. I got a recipe off my friend, Lissa and it was called Jim Leahy’s bread. Dunno who Jim is, but it’s a pretty handy bread to have in your repertoire. The main problem I’ve had is that it doesn’t work so well with freshly milled flour. Until I included an autolyse. I autolyse this loaf for 3 hours before adding the yeast. I did one fold before going to bed and left it on the counter all night.

Next morning it had over proofed and was also a bit too wet, and so hard to shape. I let it rise for about an hour in the morning and then baked it in the oven. Now I just need to work out how to fit it into cob oven baking schedule - maybe leave in the fridge to rise and shape later in the day when the oven is almost ready.

The cob oven had to get repaired recently and I’m still waiting for it to dry enough to bake in. This was it a week ago and I’ve had a little fire going in it most of the days ever since. We ended up putting about 6 inches of cob over what I had and it’s very dense and should be great when fully dry and ready to cook in! I’m looking forward to that.

And now after a week……

Bread – overnight yeast dough

I originally got this recipe from my friend Lissa who got it from Jim Leahy. You can use any type of flour – bread flour, bakers flour, plain flour or even fresh ground wheat*. The texture will vary with different flours.

Make a double batch and make Buns or bread. If making buns with sultanas, take out a half of the dough before leaving to rise overnight and mix in some sultanas with the other half.

Ingredients (including for different sized batches)

360g Bakers flour (500g) 720g

295g water (410g) 590g – maybe more if wholemeal flour

1 tablespoon olive oil for the two smaller loaves and 2 tablespoons for the larger loaf

1 teaspoon of salt 2 teaspoons

¼ for the smaller loaves and ½ teaspoon Yeast for the bigger loaf.

Method

Mix the ingredients in a large bowl (or Thermomix). The mixture will be shaggy.

Cover and leave the bowl to sit overnight. You can do a couple of folds in the first hour (2-4). If the weather is warm, place in the fridge. Leave out if its winter.

Next morning, punch the dough down and tip out onto a floured bench. Flatten the dough a little and then grab an edge of the dough and stretch it into the middle dough. Repeat this with all corners and then roll into a loaf shape and place in a tin.

You can let this rise for another hour, while the oven heats up to 240C. Or put it straight into a cold oven and turn the heat on.

Cook for about half an hour once it comes to temperature. It will be browned on top and bottom and sound hollow when tapped.

*When using Fresh Milled Flour, autolyse for 3-4 hours – so start the bread early afternoon to finish off in the evening and then allow to sit. Reduce the water amount by 20ml for the autolyse and then mix the 20ml water in with the yeast before adding to the loaf. I think that helps it to mix in better. This is still in trial phase but with regular flour, I’ve made it many times.